


Dusk

by LNJames



Series: Suddenly Everything Has Changed [10]
Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-20
Updated: 2019-01-20
Packaged: 2019-10-13 02:25:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,235
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17479445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LNJames/pseuds/LNJames
Summary: Each thunderous wild heart.Season 4/3 re-imagined. Canonish, with liberties and justice for all.





	Dusk

_I cannot explain it any other way._

Sometimes, when the light is just so, it fragments into pastel on the curve of the earth before burning into something richer. Blue-pinks and yellows turn deep-orange and red as the sun performs a miracle before it sinks. If lucky, it feels like the world is still holding on to something special, trying to entice the ephemeral to stay a little longer. And then the dip of the world tilts to a certain degree, six to be precise, and the center of the sun slides below the horizon. All the colors in the world go dark. It’s a loss that Lena forces herself to witness as often as she can, if only because the morning brings everything back to life. If only it were that easy. With a reluctant shove away from the table, Lena made herself take a break and retreat to the highest point in the sky she could get without flying. Glass encased her atop L-Corp’s shining tower as National City laid out before her like a sparkling plate. Here, she could breathe in a different way, here she could let her shoulders relax. The lab tucked deep below concrete and behind lead-lined walls was too artificial, too clinical, too removed from the living, breathing parts of herself.

Dusk takes back what dawn gives.

If it hadn’t been a year of hard knocks already, Lena would have sighed at her own dramatics. She was past the point of no return, working on a puzzle that eluded her as much as it haunted. Lena was beginning to think that the reason she hadn’t solved it yet, hadn’t been able to get the numbers to add up, was because...there was no answer. That was always a possibility, one her mind rarely let her entertain. But she was a scientist for a reason and if she were the best among many, then she needed to accept all combinations of probabilities and possible outcomes and unknown knowns. Eve was the first to broach it, quietly in a darkened lab full of state of the art equipment at an hour of the night past quitting time.

*

_“Ms. Luthor?”_

_Lena took the soft interruption as a sign that her neck needed to stretch and her eyes needed to blink shut and her body needed to move away from a microscope and data streams. There was something off in the formula and they couldn’t find it, couldn’t trace the Proteinase K signatures to find the cause of cells eating themselves alive right after triple-massing. The harun-el extract could accelerate the process like a miracle from the stars. But their own split-suppressant had no shutoff valve, no way to tell the body to stop before the body burned out. Making cells stronger and more invincible caused the inverse - faster decay, a quicker fall. Lena reached up and ran her hand through her hair and tried not to consider such things and what it might mean for a superhero._

_“Yes, Ms. Teschmacher?”_

_They had taken to calling each other with formality, a small endearment bred from hours together and a fondness for another curious mind in the hunt for an answer._

_“I wonder...if we’re looking for the wrong thing?”_

_Lena opened her eyes and turned, her blond assistant turned lab manager was twirling her pen between her fingers as her head leaned back to look up at the ceiling in a low slung lab chair on wheels. She smiled at how Eve had her feet kicked up on a stack of computer servers brought in to power a secure computational machine learning system to run a modified Dendritic Cell Algorithm. They needed a way to create and refine endless combinations of antigens super-charged by the harun-el extract. Somewhere in that whirling dervish of numbers, a curious thing occurred, a recursive sequence, a duplicative set of variables randomly generating over and over again. It was complicated, maybe impossible, and Lena had thrown herself into the science of it all soon after..everything._

_Everything in this case meant the last year, meant Morgan Edge and Sam and Reign and the Worldkillers. It also meant creating synthetic kryptonite, refractive environments, replicated harun-el. It meant near death and hardship and fear and fights and a soft pulling away that both she and Kara felt but never said. It had been enough for Kara to leave, in more ways than one. Somewhere in the middle of it all, Kara Zor-El had left earth and with it, Lena. Physically, yes, for a time and how could Lena argue with Kara wanting to go home to once-forgotten Argo City? Of securing harun-el to try to save Sam? Of course Kara should go. Of course, how could she not. But Kara also left in the way her eyes wouldn’t look at Lena the same and the way her hands never seemed to reach for something inside Lena that only Kara saw. Lena tried not to take it personally; it most certainly and most definitely was personal._

_“How so?”_

_Eve let her head loll to the side and pointed with her pen towards the whirling machines full of numbers, each one spinning out a possible answer._

_“We’re trying to solve for y, right? And we’ve varied x over and over again. And no matter how many times we do that, the model doesn’t quite fit the data. The data is from human trials that fail over and over again. Is it possible that there will never be a model that will ever replicate something that doesn’t exist? Maybe it’s impossible to solve because it can’t be solved. Or maybe it shouldn’t be solved.”_

_Lena listened and realized how tired she was, how physically and emotionally exhausted she had become in this quest for something just outside her reach. It felt like that moment, long ago, when she shouted to the sky for proof that something existed, that there was magic in the air somewhere that only she could see or feel or know. Sometimes a miracle happened and sometimes...it didn’t. That was a probability even she could count on._

_“You may be right.”_

_She smiled when Eve twirled her pen a little around head and smirked at Lena with a sing-song voice._

_“I may be crazy.”_

_Lena laughed and followed along, the strain of too much thinking finally getting to her and looking for a way out, their voices joining together._

_“And it may just be a lunatic you’re looking for..”_

_They both dissolved into bad 80’s music, their loopy science-induced singing echoing in the solid walls of a lab. Too much time spent looking for a needle in a haystack when that needle may not exist and the haystack wasn’t real. Too many hours underground, too many thoughts, too far away from someone who could ground her and keep Lena tethered to the here and now. There were many ways to solve a problem, but Lena began to wonder if she even had her fingers on the right problem to begin with after all._

_Long after Eve had left, Lena sat alone in the lab trying to make sense of science and the answers they did not have until she emptied her head of everything and let her mind wander, searching for a connection. Something came back, a line tucked away but not forgotten. ‘We know this: those with the largest hearts in the world generally travel in pairs.’_

_And then something clicked, another door opened and suddenly Lena realized how all the pieces fit back together again. The problem became evident and the answer could change everything._

*

Now, Lena heard her own heels click down the quiet hallway towards Kara’s apartment, the subdued sounds of people living their lives inside smaller rooms catching her ears faintly as she walked by each door. It was strange, in some ways, to visit Kara here after such a long absence. She had forgotten the non-descript art on the walls, the smells of cooking, the way the rest of the city twinkled in through the window at the end of the hall like constellations. National City and the night sky brought Lena here, after a long day that started at CatCo and ended in the basement of L-Corp until every bone in her body ached. The thought of going back to her apartment, alone with all that empty space, was abandoned in the car with a few soft words to Chao-xing, _Please take me to Kara’s,_ as if she hadn’t said that before.

It was only a month ago that they had met at Noonan’s to try to rebuild what they had lost and they had slowly started to repair the damage. _Friends._ They were back in that place together and it was enough for Lena. When Sam had returned from a much needed recovery and vacation away from the states, Lena had left for a few weeks to Metropolis. She took with her the weight of the last year in National City and threw herself into the work of settling Sam Arias and Ruby into L-Corp Northeast and a new life after Reign. It felt good to leave everything behind, National City and all that happened there for a few weeks of hard work and stabilizing Sam. She hadn’t been ready to let her young protege go without making sure all was well. They drank wine in the evenings and worked on business plans during the day, each relieved to focus on something normal instead of what happened. That didn’t mean that her thoughts were far from a certain super one, it just meant it was a little easier to adjust to what it meant to go from loving Kara one way to something different. As if she could just stop loving Kara.

But her work in the lab with Eve brought with it the weight of an idea, a thought, a possibility that she wasn’t sure either of them wanted to entertain. Lena was sure that something had happened somewhere between the time she reconstituted the harun-el into liquid form, the terra-forming battle, and Kara’s struggle in the Dark Valley. She had only fragments of what happened, a few quiet words from Sam before she left town with Ruby to recover and restart a life torn apart. Once in Metropolis, Sam wanted to put the whole thing behind her and so they talked about the banal instead of her time as Reign. Lena couldn’t blame her, really. And of course, Kara had been less forthcoming, Alex was a non-starter, and Lena was left to piece together events and what happened on her own. At the time, everything had been clouded by the lingering sting of their disagreements, their distance, and the immense threat Reign posed. Kara had been scared and angry and doing her best to recover from the Fall and fight the Worldkillers. Lena had been scared and defensive and doing her best to help Sam and help Kara. They both took it out on each other in ways that they regretted. Now, she remembered snippets of the time she and Kara started to unravel, the cracks coming in moments large and small.

***

_They had stood in the reconstructed L-Corp vault that held Reign again, sedated with poison from another planet, wounded from Kryptonite bullets. Kara stood behind her, watching the scene, detached but vigilant. Lena’s head was fully in the science behind subduing a Kryptonian until she felt warmth against the back of her neck where her black dressed dipped a little. Kara’s words were quiet._

_“I owe you an apology.”_

_When she turned around, Kara looked down and crossed her arms. They had been distant, each new day bringing more chaos and danger and urgency to the tasks at hand: save Sam and save the world. Kara had been focused after The Fall and Lena tried her best. They both were struggling with what the world had brought upon their respective doorsteps: Reign and the Worldkillers and Morgan Edge and a very sick friend. Each felt rocked by what had happened to them, how close each had come to death and how much danger the people they loved faced. It changed something, just enough, to alter the way they were with each other. Small things turned into larger things turned into the space between them widening without realizing it or knowing how to fix it. It was the butterfly effect writ upon them both until it was too late. Lena let her eyes fall on Kara, a supersuit and cape making her seem a distant figure, more removed than she had in the past. Kara nodded and continued, her voice balancing between duty and something more familiar._

_“For being so hard on you. Without your Kryptonite, we wouldn’t have stopped her.”_

_Lena lifted her head slightly before she looked down again, sensing that while this was a fact, there was a ‘but’ attached to it._

_“You have to understand when it’s Kryptonite, to me that’s more than a gun or any of the other dangers you were talking about.”_

_Kara shook her head and kept her arms close around her. Lena took in a deep breath, recalling the pointed disagreement they had had about threats humans faced and Lena’s thoughts about life and death. It was painfully true that humans were constantly confronted with the things that could do them harm and yet still got up every morning. Lena knew that her words had hit a nerve and there was nothing Kara could do about how a human could falter except to try to save as many as she could whenever she could. It had made Kara react defensively, a flair of anger at the impotency and she took that out, for better or for worse, on the messenger. On Lena. Fighting with Kara felt like the worst thing she could imagine, both firm in their beliefs and their words even when it shook things loose and left marks no one could see, Lena was not unfamiliar with the invisible damage words could do._

_“It’s personal.”_

_Kara was right, because it was personal and it was between them, it stung harder and sharper. Lena looked at her and felt something crack inside. It hurt more that Kara assumed Lena had ill intent all along, that she wasn’t fully aware of what Kryptonite could do to Kara and how careful she needed to be. Lena never intended for the things she made to hurt the ones she loved, she was trying to save in any way she could._

_“It’s personal to me, too. It was a way to help my friend.”_

_Kara looked down and tried to make it better but she was never good at lying._

_“I do trust you, Lena.”_

_After all this time, after all they had been through, how close they had grown and this is what it came back to again and again. Lena felt her jaw clench before she spoke, walling off another piece of herself for good measure._

_“Good.”_

_It was a crisp, sharp word that meant anything but._

***

The door was white and solidly built, holding things inside and keeping things out. There was a small wrapped wreath of tiny orange bittersweet hanging at eye level, enticing Lena at the same time the rest of her knew this was a bad idea. When her car pulled up out front, she felt the push-pull tucked deep inside. They had changed, she and Kara and their relationship, and she no longer felt the right to knock on this door this late or to use a key she hadn’t used in more than a month. They had agreed to try again, as friends and coworkers. That month ago morning in Noonan’s had solidified their plan and reminded them of the missing. The distance between their bodies and the solid table holding coffee and their nervous hands helped establish different rules, different boundaries. Nice tidy boxes to put what they meant to each other in and lock it all away.

It had all been negotiated gently, haltingly over coffee, over lunch, in softer words and with the best intent. Yes of course they still cared about each other, deeply. Yes most certainly they wanted the other in their lives. Yes, it made sense to start over, to keep things nice and easy and friendly. And yes, they were sorry, each for different things, each carrying their own burden for the damage that lingered on the other. It was all much safer this way, it didn’t mix business with their personal life, it didn’t put the other at greater risk. After that was decided, it was all very easy to fall back into catching up on time missed, to touch on the the sore spots without having to dig deeper. When they both had risen from the table, each reluctant to go but unsure of how to do so. Kara had leaned in, pulling Lena into a hug that nearly undid it all. Instead, they parted with smiles, ready to practice their new way of existing in a world in which they were Lena Luthor and Kara Danvers, friends and colleagues and amicable exes who could meet for friendly collegial lunches. It was a good thing Lena left for Metropolis shortly thereafter, making it all slightly easier on the eyes and the heart to not see Kara day in and day out at CatCo.

So what was she doing here, now, leaning against the wall outside Kara’s apartment like a teenager at this time of night? The easiest answer, after a day of no easy answers, was the hardest to admit. Lena reached up and ran her hand through her hair, loosened in the car ride because her head hurt. She let her hand run over her eyes, squeezing them shut and pinching at her nose, willing herself to walk back down to her waiting car and pretend she was never here.

“Lena?”

The door had opened and Kara’s concerned eyes, void of glasses, fell on her, warmth spreading across her face and Lena knew this was the wrong choice. She took a deep breath and pushed off the wall, just about to smile and talk her way out of this as a Kara reached out and a strong hand curled around her wrist.

“Is everything okay?”

It was a loaded question and if Lena had the answer to it, she would have stopped asking it of herself long ago. There was something off in the universe, maybe, something slightly not right with anything anymore. Lena looked at Kara carefully to see if she could see it, the shimmer of atoms in disarray or the color of a golden sunset turned red just under the surface, the absence of something, of a piece of Kara that she felt more than knew. The biggest hearts travel in pairs, one split into two through no fault of its own. Who could guess what a rock from outer space could do if in the wrong hands or in hands of superhero. She had done the math and entertained the magic and for once, Lena wished she were wrong. The only way to know for sure was to test a theory. With a deep breath, she looked into Kara’s eyes and spoke softly.

“I have something to tell you.”


End file.
